Comments by the late Jack Miller based on Galatians 4.4–7 concerning our adoption in Christ
When praying, honest confession is where spiritual power begins.
In the Christian church there are too many ‘good’ people who do not go to God. Why should you go to God if you think you just need a little tweaking, a little propping up? People like this pray with self-effort, with insecurity, with guilt, and with little sense of forgiveness. But these are not the prayers of a child of God.
Remember, God has undertaken a great rescue operation in history. Jesus was born under the law of God and took upon himself the condemnation we deserved for our sin. Now the full legal rights of adoption are given to us who are in Christ by faith. What does our position as God’s child teach us about praying? What you need to pray is: ‘Lord, I’m going to be a shambles today. I need your grace desperately’. You won’t pray this way unless you see your need. You can’t pray effectively without confidence that God loves you, hears you, and is interested in and wants to answer your prayers. Do you pray with a full knowledge of your position? Do not underestimate the glory of the cross.
Someone who belongs
Because God has made you his child, you don’t have to view yourself as an orphan any more, but as an insider, someone who belongs.
God sent his Son to set us free from the law and has now enabled us to be in fellowship with him by giving us his Spirit who lives inside us and cries ‘Abba! Father!’. We are no longer orphans, no longer slaves, but sons and daughters who can afford to be honest because we belong to our heavenly Father. We are part of the spiritual family through faith in his Son.
Being God’s dearly loved child means that we can start to think spiritually. We learn to think God’s way; to see our experiences – especially the painful ones – through the eyes of Christ. What are the areas of your life where you feel like an orphan? Where are you living as if there is no God, no forgiveness, no hope, and no Holy Spirit to change you and others? Identify and reject the orphan viewpoint in yourself.
Listen to the gospel of Jesus Christ by faith. When you believe the gospel of Jesus Christ, it changes you. When you hear by faith, powerful living follows – a life characterised by faith that expresses itself in loving others in amazing ways.
God wants you there
Sometimes you are so weak, or your heart is so hurt, or you’ve been so convicted of your sins, that you can hardly pray.
All you can do is groan and say, ‘God be merciful’. According to Paul, even this is powerful. God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who cries through us ‘Abba! Father!’. When Jesus made this cry in the garden of Gethsemane, he had submitted himself to God completely. Our cry is not like Jesus’s because we are not facing for-sakenness. We have been accepted. We’re not going into hell; Jesus went there on the cross for us. Therefore when that cry comes from us, ‘Abba! Father!’, it is ultimately a cry of delight. There may be deep pain in it, but it’s also the cry of the one who delights in the Father. So the call to pray is not a legalistic one but a call to meet with one who wants you there. He not only provided for your justification, acceptance and adoption, but has given you a Spirit who knows how to pray in you and through you and knows how to delight in God.
Talking from the heart
The very essence of talking to God is talking from your heart.
Ask God to give you the Holy Spirit to pray for you (Romans 8.26,27). Ask the Spirit of wisdom to be with you as you pray. When we pray and cry out ‘Abba! Father!’ the Holy Spirit too cries out, ‘Abba! Father!’.
When you pray, the Spirit prays in you and through you, teaching you how to pray. Do you think God doesn’t hear his own Spirit when he cries out? Praying ‘Abba! Father!’ is the deepest prayer of faith. It can’t go deeper than when you know the significance of God being your Father. The very word father carries with it hope, love, forgiveness, faith and acceptance. In prayer you surrender to God’s will. Thank him for the answers to your prayers before you even get them. Thank God for delayed answers knowing that these help faith to grow. God wants a fuller identification of your heart with his. What pulls it all together isn’t this answer and that answer; it is you becoming a son or daughter. He wants your whole heart. Hand everything in to God. Our hearts in tune with his heart is the centre of prayer. Ask God to teach us how to pray. He will do just that.
Under control?
Do you pretend to have your self-centred-ness, your sinful desires (what God calls ‘the flesh’) under control? When I believed in Jesus, I had no idea that I would have such a struggle with sin. Even when we start with the best motives, our self-centredness can (and does) take over and we can easily self-destruct. There’s something compulsive within us that has the capacity to master us.
The reason more people don’t experience deliverance, liberation, and progress is that it’s standard in evangelical Christianity to pretend that our flesh is under control. We are not so much moral as moralistic. We are not so much obedient to God as obedient to our own rules. And we’re much more satisfied with the appearance of being near to God than actually being near to God. Have you ever had this experience: You cried out to God to help you with a problem, and you were delivered? Afterward you thanked God lightly and patted yourself heavily on the back? To begin thinking like a son or a daughter of God instead of like an orphan, you must have a heart of faith that knows you are loved by God, and a heart of humility that recognises how weak and poor and stumbling and far from God you are. Jesus didn’t come to save the half-lost, but to reach into the very pit for us.
Defeat can be a doorway
Have past hurts made you suspicious of people? Let Jesus speak to you in the midst of that. Maybe you don’t want to listen to him, but there’s one word of Scripture that I hope sticks with you: You are no longer a slave but a son or daughter. You have the position and status and love of a child of God. God loves you unconditionally, and God is growing in you a capacity to love others unconditionally.
This means that you can expect a life that has some tension in it. Perhaps you’ve been experiencing the bad tension that comes from being fixated on an old hurt or wound inflicted by another. Good tension is when you begin to learn things about yourself that you don’t like because they’re not part of who God has made you to be. It may even be that the things that are disturbing you are signs of new life, signs that the Holy Spirit is working in you.
Sometimes what looks like a defeat is only the doorway to a new ministry for you. Where you hurt most of all, where God meets your need, and where he brings other people’s lives together with yours, may be the springboard for action.
